“The more you read, the more things you know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.” Dr Suess

We believe that reading has many benefits.  It enables you to access and learn about the world.  It improves your vocabulary and communication. It develops your imagination and creativity. It helps you build relationships.  It improves your self-esteem.

As a school, we ensure that all our pupils experience success in reading, in a personalised way, whatever their starting point. We do this as follows:

Pre-Reading and Writing Skills

To ensure our pupils have the skills to access formal synthetic phonics, our curriculum provides the opportunity to develop pre-reading and writing skills. This can include:

  • Building and developing attention

  • Turn taking 

  • Learning about sound in everyday contexts

  • Extended and embedded vocabulary and story language

  • Recognising text and images 

  • Handling books

  • Developing fine and gross motor skills 

  • Instilling a love of and interest in books.

Synthetic Phonics

Once pupils are developmentally ready they move onto Read Write Inc or Freshstart to further enhance their skills and understanding of phonics. Whilst phonics sessions are taught discreetly as part of our daily Communication and Literacy sessions, pupils practise decoding words throughout the school day.  

Language Comprehension

Alongside formal synthetic phonics, our pupils develop language comprehension and word recognition skills. Reading sessions establish background knowledge, key vocabulary and understanding of literacy concepts and genres. Our pupils are enabled to understand the structure of language and apply verbal reasoning. For some pupils, sight recognition is used to complement their overall development of word recognition. 

A Text Rich Approach

Reading continues to be taught throughout the curriculum via a text rich topic based approach. Our book-based curriculum not only develops reading but provides a meaningful context for writing. Pupils are encouraged to explore the contexts, structure and features, thematic content and big ideas in texts. Daily reading slots enhance pupils' independence and love of reading. 

Reading Spaces

In order to engender a culture of reading Greenacre has designated reading spaces such as our reading den, reading corners and library. Pupils access our reading club, and are part of our reading ambassador group.